texascavers Digest 25 Jan 2009 10:23:07 -0000 Issue 698
texascavers Digest 25 Jan 2009 10:23:07 - Issue 698 Topics (messages 10054 through 10062): Re: Help the NSS 10054 by: Alex Sproul Latest White Nose Syndrome Bat News 10055 by: Minton, Mark L Yah pictures 10056 by: Lyndon Tiu TSA Members Area Update and Longhorn Caverns State Park Dig, Saturday, February 7th 10057 by: Mark.Alman.l-3com.com Paging ... 10058 by: Mark.Alman.l-3com.com Re: Obama virus alert--this one's real 10059 by: Jules Jenkins 10060 by: Louise Power SW China Karst Trip â Oct 10-26, 2009 10061 by: dirtdoc.comcast.net Carlsbad's 8 million 'lost' bats likely never existed : 10062 by: JerryAtkin.aol.com Administrivia: To subscribe to the digest, e-mail: texascavers-digest-subscr...@texascavers.com To unsubscribe from the digest, e-mail: texascavers-digest-unsubscr...@texascavers.com To post to the list, e-mail: texascavers@texascavers.com -- ---BeginMessage--- Rob Bisset said: Maybe these fine folkswould comment on their experience serving the caving comunity on the national level, with the hope that it would encourage other Texan's to serve. Bill Mixon (1971-1997) Bill Steele (1978-1981) Dwight Deal (1967-1977) Gill Ediger (1973-1976) Ronnie Fieseler (in the '70s) James Reddell (in the '60s) I certainly hope they will not only do that, but consider serving again. We doubtless failed to properly appreciate their service enough to cause them to stay on. They are all older and wiser now, and the Board desperately needs their experience, which it clearly presently lacks. We don't have the luxury these days of reinventing the wheel, ignoring the body of policy already codified, or bench-warming. Between the greying and dwindling of our membership, the pressing need to expand the Society's facilities and outreach, and the present economic hard times exascerbating both, we could sure use their vision and help. We need people who understand the NSS and management, and who are willing to work. These folks have clearly demonstrated those abilities. Alex -- Alex Sproul NSS 8086RL/FE NSS Webmaster ---End Message--- ---BeginMessage--- There's a story about the spread of White Nose Syndrome in bats to Pennsylvania at http://www.pgc.state.pa.us/pgc/cwp/view.asp?Q=175717A=11. Mark Minton WHITE-NOSE SYNDROME SURFACES IN PENNSYLVANIA By Joe Kosack Wildlife Conservation Education Specialist Pennsylvania Game Commission SHINDLE, Mifflin County - Aware since 2008 that White-Nose Syndrome appeared to be making its way to the Keystone State, the Pennsylvania Game Commission now has evidence that the deadly bat disorder is likely present in a mine near this small community in the state's heartland. Where else this may be occurring and the consequence to bats - a fragile guild of wildlife species - remains an unfolding story. In late December, Dr. DeeAnn Reeder, a biologist with Bucknell University, and Greg Turner, a biologist with the Game Commission's Wildlife Diversity Section, found bats in an old Mifflin County iron mine that exhibited some of the signs of White-Nose Syndrome (WNS), during field investigations into bat hibernation patterns that included weekly monitoring for the disorder's presence in several Pennsylvania hibernacula. During this work, which had been ongoing for weeks, dozens of bats suddenly had a fungus appear around their muzzles and on wing membranes, while many more displayed other symptoms associated with this disorder. Several bats were submitted to the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, which now is reporting that the bats have preliminarily tested positive for the cold-loving fungi found on many bats with WNS. Our agency, with assistance from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other management partners, will work diligently and methodically to measure the extent of the problem in Pennsylvania and monitor the disorder's progression, said Carl G. Roe, Game Commission executive director. This find is a direct result of the Game Commission's ongoing initiative to proactively monitor for WNS. To date, no dead bats have been found in Pennsylvania. That's a plus, but it comes with no promise of what will or won't follow. In New York and New England, the disorder seems to arouse bats from hibernation prematurely. Once they depart from caves and mines, they quickly sap their energy reserves and die on the landscape. Mortality in some colonies has exceeded 90 percent, ensuring that any local recovery will be quite lengthy given the low reproductive rate of bats. Little brown and the federally-endangered Indiana bats produce only one young per year. Currently, researchers still are unsure exactly how bats contract WNS and how it initially and,
[Texascavers] Carlsbad's 8 million 'lost' bats likely never existed :
Carlsbad's 8 million 'lost' bats likely never existed Thermal imaging and algorithms challenge famous estimate By _Susan Milius_ (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/authored/id/70/name/Susan_Milius) Web edition : Friday, January 23rd, 2009 Eight million is a lot of bats to lose, and now a new study may explain what happened to the possibly lost bats of Carlsbad Cavern. Short answer: According to a Boston University team, the famous 8 million bats never existed in the first place. From spring to fall, the cave Carlsbad Cavern in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park still hosts hundreds of thousands of migratory Brazilian free-tailed bats that thrill visitors by boiling out of the cave at dusk for a night’s foraging. All the bats roosting in the cave emerge in a dense plume that streams on and on and on, sometimes for an hour or three. As with many wildlife spectacles these days, always present is the disturbing possibility that today’s show is a mere wisp compared to the great Carlsbad bat clouds of yore. In 1937 V.C. Allison published an estimate of the Brazilian free-tailed bat numbers based on timing an emergence (14 minutes at great density; four minutes at half that) and eyeballing the speed and size of the stream. About 8.7 million bats roost in the cavern, he reported. Since then, methods and numbers have varied, but estimates haven’t topped a million. Consequently, conservationists have raised alarms about perils to bats. Or maybe Allison’s eyeballs played tricks on him, or the great emergence flights really have shrunk drastically. Starting in 2005, bat scientist Thomas Kunz of Boston University and colleagues brought new technology to Carlsbad Cavern to count and observe the animals. Parts of the cave where bats roost are closed to visitors to prevent disturbances to the animals. But to improve the census and studies, the park allowed Kunz’s team to venture into these portions of the caves. One of the first field biology groups to use military-derived thermal imaging, Kunz’s team attracted the U.S. Park Service’s interest by pointing out that the researchers didn’t need to shine any lights, even at infrared wavelengths, on the bats; the cameras detect heat directly. “Surreal” and “disgusting, yet absolutely amazing” is how Nickolay Hristov, now at Brown University in Providence, R.I., describes the roosting sites. “ Imagine standing on a 20- to 30-foot cushion of bat poop covered with a constantly moving carpet of dermestid beetles and their larvae,” he says. “As you move around you are being rained on by bat urine,” Hristov says. Bat excretions don’t have the same odor as human equivalents, he says, but “ the smell of ammonia is so strong that your eyes burn.” A single bat barely makes any noise that humans can hear but tens of thousands of them together get “ quite loud,” he says. ”I would grab the camera and go back in a heartbeat.” To count the bats emerging, the researchers set up cameras around the cavern mouth to get a clear view of the stream. Magrit Betke of Boston University’s computer science department developed algorithms for analyzing the camera’s recordings. Her work basically allowed a computer to pinpoint bats as spots in a camera frame and then track the spots across enough frames to confirm the dots were indeed bats. The analysis ends up with a count of each spot in the vast stream. In a series of counts in 2005, numbers varied from a low of not quite 70,000 as bats started to arrive from their southern winter caves, to a peak about 10 times higher weeks later as migrating bats on their way elsewhere took shelter. Even at the peak, counts came up some 8 million bats short of the old estimate. So the Boston team used the Brazilian free-tails’ average 0.28-meter wingspread to model how many bat wing-beat “spheres” would fit through the cavern in a minute. A choke point inside the cavern narrows to only 120 square meters, and bats don’t fly wall-to-wall. At most, 50,000 bats per minute could fit through that choke point and emerge from the cavern mouth. Thus a single million would be closer to the number of bats possible that wowed Allison. For 8.7 million bats to have flown through the choke point in 18 minutes, as Allison reported, the densest crowd would have had to pass through at 500,000 bats per minute. Their wings and bodies would have had to pass through each other to somehow squeeze through the passage. “The Boston study clearly shows there’s no physical way that could happen,” says Renée West, supervisory biologist for Carlsbad Caverns National Park. “ That’s a relief.” The park has discounted Allison’s numbers as excessive, she says, and she’s glad to have the new analysis. “That doesn’t mean these bats aren’t declining,” Hristov says. “The declines just haven’t been as bad.” And for the cavern’s human visitors, hundreds of
Re: [Texascavers] Carlsbad's 8 million 'lost' bats likely never existed :
Thanks for posting that, Jerry. I have long wondered how the 8 million figure could be justified. DirtDoc
[Texascavers] Cave On - 2 Foreign Explorers Obsessed with China's Caves
The English language China on-line news, China.org.cn, in Sunday’s edition, January 25, 2009, featured an interview with Erin Lynch and Duncan Collis. Some of you have met Erin, a US caver who is the driving force behind the Guilin-based Hong Meigui Cave Exploration Society. Hong Meigui http://www.hongmeigui.net/ has been responsible for many of the spectacular cave discoveries in China in recent years. Erin and some other Hong Meigui expedition members presented several programs at the NSS convention in Florida. Erin is also completing her MS work at Western Kentucky University under Chris Groves. Here is a link to the interview: Cave On - 2 Foreign Explorers Obsessed with China's Caves. http://www.china.org.cn/english/environment/207822.htm DirtDoc
[NMCAVER] Carlsbad's 8 million 'lost' bats likely never existed
Interesting application of modern science to an old rumor about how many bats there were in Carlsbad Cavern: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40178/title/Carlsbads_8_million_lost_bats_likely_never_existed. Mark Minton Carlsbad's 8 million 'lost' bats likely never existed Thermal imaging and algorithms challenge famous estimate By Susan Milius Web edition : Friday, January 23rd, 2009 Eight million is a lot of bats to lose, and now a new study may explain what happened to the possibly lost bats of Carlsbad Cavern. Short answer: According to a Boston University team, the famous 8 million bats never existed in the first place. From spring to fall, the cave Carlsbad Cavern in New Mexicos Carlsbad Caverns National Park still hosts hundreds of thousands of migratory Brazilian free-tailed bats that thrill visitors by boiling out of the cave at dusk for a nights foraging. All the bats roosting in the cave emerge in a dense plume that streams on and on and on, sometimes for an hour or three. As with many wildlife spectacles these days, always present is the disturbing possibility that todays show is a mere wisp compared to the great Carlsbad bat clouds of yore. In 1937 V.C. Allison published an estimate of the Brazilian free-tailed bat numbers based on timing an emergence (14 minutes at great density; four minutes at half that) and eyeballing the speed and size of the stream. About 8.7 million bats roost in the cavern, he reported. Since then, methods and numbers have varied, but estimates havent topped a million. Consequently, conservationists have raised alarms about perils to bats. Or maybe Allisons eyeballs played tricks on him, or the great emergence flights really have shrunk drastically. Starting in 2005, bat scientist Thomas Kunz of Boston University and colleagues brought new technology to Carlsbad Cavern to count and observe the animals. Parts of the cave where bats roost are closed to visitors to prevent disturbances to the animals. But to improve the census and studies, the park allowed Kunzs team to venture into these portions of the caves. One of the first field biology groups to use military-derived thermal imaging, Kunzs team attracted the U.S. Park Services interest by pointing out that the researchers didnt need to shine any lights, even at infrared wavelengths, on the bats; the cameras detect heat directly. Surreal and disgusting, yet absolutely amazing is how Nickolay Hristov, now at Brown University in Providence, R.I., describes the roosting sites. Imagine standing on a 20- to 30-foot cushion of bat poop covered with a constantly moving carpet of dermestid beetles and their larvae, he says. As you move around you are being rained on by bat urine, Hristov says. Bat excretions dont have the same odor as human equivalents, he says, but the smell of ammonia is so strong that your eyes burn. A single bat barely makes any noise that humans can hear but tens of thousands of them together get quite loud, he says. I would grab the camera and go back in a heartbeat. To count the bats emerging, the researchers set up cameras around the cavern mouth to get a clear view of the stream. Magrit Betke of Boston Universitys computer science department developed algorithms for analyzing the cameras recordings. Her work basically allowed a computer to pinpoint bats as spots in a camera frame and then track the spots across enough frames to confirm the dots were indeed bats. The analysis ends up with a count of each spot in the vast stream. In a series of counts in 2005, numbers varied from a low of not quite 70,000 as bats started to arrive from their southern winter caves, to a peak about 10 times higher weeks later as migrating bats on their way elsewhere took shelter. Even at the peak, counts came up some 8 million bats short of the old estimate. So the Boston team used the Brazilian free-tails average 0.28-meter wingspread to model how many bat wing-beat spheres would fit through the cavern in a minute. A choke point inside the cavern narrows to only 120 square meters, and bats dont fly wall-to-wall. At most, 50,000 bats per minute could fit through that choke point and emerge from the cavern mouth. Thus a single million would be closer to the number of bats possible that wowed Allison. For 8.7 million bats to have flown through the choke point in 18 minutes, as Allison reported, the densest crowd would have had to pass through at 500,000 bats per minute. Their wings and bodies would have had to pass through each other to somehow squeeze through the passage. The Boston study clearly shows theres no physical way that could happen, says Renée West, supervisory biologist for Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Thats a relief. The park has discounted Allisons numbers as excessive, she says, and shes glad to have the new analysis. That doesnt mean these bats arent declining, Hristov says. The declines just havent been as bad. And for the caverns human visitors, hundreds of thousands
